Science & Environment

[spaminator]

New dinosaur species with foot-long claws discovered in Mongolia
The fossils included an 'exceptionally preserved' and strongly curved claw

Author of the article:Washington Post
Washington Post
Frances Vinall
Published Mar 26, 2025 • Last updated 19 hours ago • 2 minute read

The claw of Duonychus tsogtbaatari, a newly described species, was excavated in Mongolia on March 26, 2012.
The claw of Duonychus tsogtbaatari, a newly described species, was excavated in Mongolia on March 26, 2012. Photo by Yoshi Kobayashi /Hokkaido University
A new species of dinosaur uncovered in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia had two gigantic claws on each arm, according to findings published Tuesday in the journal iScience.


The fossils of Duonychus tsogtbaatari studied by scientists included an “exceptionally preserved” and strongly curved claw, one that probably made the species adept at grasping vegetation, the study authors wrote.

It could be “the largest fully preserved dinosaur claw” yet unearthed, study co-author Darla Zelenitsky, a paleontologist and associate professor at the University of Calgary, said in an email.

The claw included a sheath of keratin over the bone – the same material that makes up human hair and nails – which is much more vulnerable to disintegration over time.

“We know from this specimen that the claws were huge, around a foot long, and very sharp compared to the underlying bony core,” Zelenitsky said.


But she added that “despite such big, nasty claws, Duonychus was not a meat-eater.” They were in fact more like “the sloths or pandas of the Cretaceous [period]” in terms of their eating habits, and probably used their formidable talons to hook vegetation and pull it into their mouths.

The fossils were unearthed in 2012 during the construction of a water pipeline near a town in southern Mongolia. The findings, after researchers studied their significance, were published Tuesday.

The claw could have been so well-preserved because of what was happening at the time of the dinosaur’s death. “The conditions must have been just right so that the keratinous sheath was fossilized before it rotted away,” Zelenitsky said, adding that it was probably covered by the earth very soon after the creature died, protecting the claw from the elements and scavengers for about 90 million years.


Jake Kotevski, a vertebrate paleontologist with Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, who was not involved in the study, said in an email that many dinosaurs were presumed to have keratin covering their claws. But “very, very rarely” were fossils found with this part of the claw still intact.

“I think this is an exciting study that enhances our knowledge of theropod evolution,” he said, referring to a lineage of dinosaurs known for traveling on two legs, the most famous member of which is the Tyrannosaurus rex.

The new species, Duonychus tsogtbaatari, was two-fingered, which makes it unusual among its cousins in the Therizinosaur group, the study authors wrote. Therizinosaurs were long-necked herbivorous or omnivorous dinosaurs that lived in Asia and North America during the Cretaceous period.


“Therizinosaurs are classically some of the most bizarre dinosaurs out there,” said Phil Bell, associate professor of paleontology at the University of New England in Australia, who was not involved in the study. “New discoveries like this highlight just how strange they really were.”

He added that two-fingered dinosaurs were not unusual overall, but to see them “turn up in Therizinosaurs – a group famously known for their massive, scythe-like claws – is quite amazing.”

A partial skeleton of the species was also uncovered.

Duonychus tsogtbaatari probably weighed about 260 kilograms, or about 570 pounds, the study said.

It was named after Khishigjav Tsogtbaatar, a paleontologist and former director of the Institute of Paleontology at the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, which was also involved in the study.

New dinosaur species with foot-long claws discovered in Mongolia

The fossils of Duonychus tsogtbaatari studied by scientists included an 'exceptionally preserved' and strongly curved claw

torontosun.com

 

[spaminator]

Parents, educators on alert as Ontario measles outbreak rises to 572 cases
Author of the article:Canadian Press
Canadian Press
Hannah Alberga
Published Mar 27, 2025 • Last updated 16 hours ago • 4 minute read

Measles symptoms typically appear seven to 21 days after exposure and include high fever, runny nose and cough, red, watery eyes and a distinctive rash that begins on the face and spreads to the rest of the body.
Measles symptoms typically appear seven to 21 days after exposure and include high fever, runny nose and cough, red, watery eyes and a distinctive rash that begins on the face and spreads to the rest of the body.
A mother of an infant, a principle of a religious school, and a public health physician — they all share the desire to get kids vaccinated as the province records another 102 new cases over the past week.


Public Health Ontario says there have been 572 cases since the outbreak began in October, 453 of them confirmed and 119 probable. Of the 42 people requiring hospitalization, two have required intensive care, and 36 have been children — most of them unvaccinated.

The highly infectious disease is still predominantly impacting unvaccinated infants, kids and teenagers, most in Southwestern and Grand Erie public health units.

Rosemary Tamburini’s nine-month-old baby is just a few months shy of his first measles shot. But she doesn’t want to wait to vaccinate her child any longer, and is considering early immunization.

“I don’t think I’m alone in that. I’ve had discussions with several moms in Ontario who are in a similar situation looking to potentially get vaccinated early,” said Tamburini, who lives in Etobicoke.


The measles vaccine typically starts for babies at one-year-old, but Ontario public health units have made the first shot available to babies as young as six months in response to the outbreak.



Geographically, measles has spread to Waterloo and Lambton. In Chatham-Kent, cases have nearly doubled to 39 in the past week, and the spread continues in Huron Perth where 55 people have been sickened.

Almost all of the cases are tied to a multi-jurisdictional outbreak that began with a travel-related case in New Brunswick that spread to Ontario and Manitoba. Ontario’s medical officer of health sent a memo to colleagues in local public health units earlier this month stating the origin of the outbreak was at a large gathering with guests from Mennonite communities in New Brunswick last fall.


Dr. Kieran Moore said cases are “disproportionately affecting some Mennonite, Amish, and other Anabaptist communities due to a combination of under-immunization and exposure to measles in certain areas.”

Not long after Christmas, a student at Walsingham Christian School, a private school in Norfolk County and part of the Old Colony Mennonite Church, got measles.

Principal Martin Klassen said they called an impromptu meeting with parents at the school to discuss vaccination, also distributing information in Low German for a few parents who aren’t fluent in English. Most kids at the school are vaccinated, Klassen said. And for parents whose kids were not, “They were open to it,” he said.

In total four kids tested positive for measles at the school around late January and early February, and all are back to school.


“Families deciding to get their children vaccinated or deciding to not get their children vaccinated has actually nothing to do with the baptism view that we have of religion. Absolutely nothing. Our ministers, our church, our brotherhood, we wouldn’t be spreading a view on should you or should you not get vaccinated,” Klassen said.


Kelly Moorcroft teaches music at schools in Ottawa. Her first reaction to the outbreak in Ontario was anger and frustration.

“When I see something like measles making a comeback when it had been declared eradicated, it’s so discouraging,” Moorcroft said.

So far, Ottawa has not reported measles cases, but she’s watching closely, and preparing.

“If I were to have a student come into my studio and flat out say, ’I’m not getting vaccinated,’ I’m not sure what I would do with that student. I would probably fire them from my studio,” she said.


But Moorcroft also acknowledged that many people in Ontario don’t have a family doctor to keep them on schedule with vaccinations.

“I’m lucky I have a doctor. There’s a lot of people out there that don’t have those.”

Outbreaks are also being monitored in other provinces, though the case counts are smaller — including in British Columbia, Manitoba and Alberta where 18 people are diagnosed, most of them minors. Last week, Saskatchewan confirmed its second case and said it was investigating a third. The latest numbers in Quebec are unchanged at 40 cases since last week.

Measles is one of the most contagious diseases in the world. The World Health Organization says the virus can remain active in the air or on infected surfaces for up to two hours.

It usually begins with a fever, cough, runny nose and red watery eyes, followed by a red blotchy rash that starts on the face and spreads to the body and limbs. The virus can lead to pneumonia, inflammation of the brain and death.

The number of cases reported in Ontario over the last week is more than the number of cases recorded over the course of a decade between 2013 and 2023.

In the United States, this year there have been 378 confirmed cases recorded across 18 jurisdictions, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data from last week.

Parents, educators on alert as Ontario measles outbreak rises to 572 cases

Public Health Ontario says there have been 572 cases since the outbreak began in October, 453 of them confirmed and 119 probable.

torontosun.com

 

[spaminator]

Rock that sat in Aussie school for years is fossil jackpot, scientists say
66 dinosaur footprints were found on the boulder, which is about 10 square feet

Author of the article:Washington Post
Washington Post
Kyle Melnick
Published Mar 28, 2025 • Last updated 21 hours ago • 3 minute read

Paleontologist Anthony Romilio brushes a roughly 200 million year old boulder at Biloela State High School in Queensland, Australia. CREDIT: University of Queensland
Paleontologist Anthony Romilio brushes a roughly 200 million year old boulder at Biloela State High School in Queensland, Australia. CREDIT: University of Queensland jpg
For two decades, Australian students walked by the 5-foot-long boulder in their school’s foyer unaware of its significance. When paleontologist Anthony Romilio finally inspected the roughly 200 million year old artifact in 2023, he had to remove a few pieces of chewed gum stuck to the sandstone before he could take a closer look.


“I was skeptical, you might say, because it’s usually not the place where you look [for fossils],” Romilio said of schools.

But Romilio found 66 dinosaur footprints on the boulder, which is about 10 square feet, marking one of the highest concentrations of dinosaur footprints ever documented in Australia, he said in a study published this month in the Historical Biology journal. Forty-seven dinosaurs stepped on the boulder, which was covered by shallow water, during their lifetimes, offering insight into dinosaurs during the Early Jurassic age, a period from which no dinosaur bones have been found in Australia, Romilio said.

Paleontologist Anthony Romilio
Paleontologist Anthony Romilio uses pink silicone to copy the boulder’s surface at Biloela State High School in Queensland, Australia. CREDIT: University of Queensland jpg
Geologist Wes Nichols discovered the boulder in the Callide Mine in Queensland, Australia, in the early 2000s. Miners have to cut through rock to access coal, and in the past few decades, rocks from the mine have been found to trace back to between 174 and 202 million years ago.


Nichols donated the boulder to his wife, Di, who taught science at nearby Biloela State High School, which serves about 550 students between grades seven and 12. A few footprints that appeared to be from dinosaurs were visible on the boulder, but nobody knew their significance.

In 2002, the school placed the roughly 330-pound boulder on a stand in its foyer, where students at the time painted a mural of dinosaurs on the walls, including a triceratops and a Tyrannosaurus rex.

Many students and teachers pass the boulder while walking into the building or outside toward the school’s playground. The room is connected to the main office, so students wait there to meet with administrators.

“The specimen had been just sitting so innocuously, you know, in our foyer for so long, it’s just become a part of where we work,” Biloela State deputy principal David Hall said. “We see it every day.”


After Romilio revealed in 2020 that he had discovered dinosaur footprints at a separate cave in Queensland, he heard from citizen scientists, ordinary people who use their basic understanding of science to conduct research and help professional scientists. They told him there was a boulder at Biloela State worth inspecting, Romilio said.

The boulder had 66 dinosaur footprints. CREDIT: University of Queensland
The boulder had 66 dinosaur footprints. CREDIT: University of Queensland jpg
Romilio said he first drove about 400 miles to the high school in 2021, when he saw the outline of dinosaur footprints on the boulder. But he couldn’t lift the rock to examine it.

Romilio said his other dinosaur research prevented him from returning to the school until 2023, when two plumbers lifted the boulder and placed it on a sofa cushion on the floor. Wearing gloves, Romilio removed gum and brushed off dirt.


He covered the boulder with a pink silicone that copied the surface and took photos of the boulder to take home. There, Romilio used 3D imaging and light filters on the photos to highlight shadows on the boulder. That made dozens of three-toed footprints stand out.

“Oh my gosh, there’s so many here,” Romilio, 55, recalled thinking.

Most of the footprints were between three and five inches long, and they appeared to be heading in different directions. Romilio said the dinosaurs might have been crossing a river.

Researchers determined the footprints belonged to the ichnospecies Anomoepus scambus. No bones for the possible species have been discovered, but paleontologists used fossilized traces – footprints and trackways – to determine the animal was probably a small, three-toed herbivore.

While Biloela State students are excited about the rock’s newfound backstory, Hall, the deputy principal, said he’s looking to move the boulder to a nearby public viewing area.

“Maybe in a more protected area,” he said, “rather than in a student foyer.”

Rock that sat in Aussie school for years is fossil jackpot, scientists say

For two decades, Australian students walked by the 5-foot-long boulder in their school's foyer unaware of its significance.

torontosun.com

 

[bob the dog]

So for a meteor impact to form a crater 110 m deep and 780 m wide as it did with West Hawk lake, I am curious what happens to the meteor to leave the crater?

 

[petros]

So for a meteor impact to form a crater 110 m deep and 780 m wide as it did with West Hawk lake, I am curious what happens to the meteor to leave the crater?

Plasma.

 

[spaminator]

Stroke survivor speaks again with help of experimental brain-computer implant
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Laura Ungar
Published Mar 31, 2025 • 2 minute read

Scientists have developed a device that can translate thoughts about speech into spoken words in real time.


Although it’s still experimental, they hope the brain-computer interface could someday help give voice to those unable to speak.

A new study described testing the device on a 47-year-old woman with quadriplegia who couldn’t speak for 18 years after a stroke. Doctors implanted it in her brain during surgery as part of a clinical trial.

It “converts her intent to speak into fluent sentences,” said Gopala Anumanchipalli, a co-author of the study published Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Other brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, for speech typically have a slight delay between thoughts of sentences and computerized verbalization. Such delays can disrupt the natural flow of conversation, potentially leading to miscommunication and frustration, researchers said.


This is “a pretty big advance in our field,” said Jonathan Brumberg of the Speech and Applied Neuroscience Lab at the University of Kansas, who was not part of the study.

A team in California recorded the woman’s brain activity using electrodes while she spoke sentences silently in her brain. The scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. They trained an AI model that translates neural activity into units of sound.

It works similarly to existing systems used to transcribe meetings or phone calls in real time, said Anumanchipalli, of the University of California, Berkeley.

The implant itself sits on the speech centre of the brain so that it’s listening in, and those signals are translated to pieces of speech that make up sentences. It’s a “streaming approach,” Anumanchipalli said, with each 80-millisecond chunk of speech _ about half a syllable — sent into a recorder.


“It’s not waiting for a sentence to finish,” Anumanchipalli said. “It’s processing it on the fly.”

Decoding speech that quickly has the potential to keep up with the fast pace of natural speech, said Brumberg. The use of voice samples, he added, “would be a significant advance in the naturalness of speech.”

Though the work was partially funded by the National Institutes of Health, Anumanchipalli said it wasn’t affected by recent NIH research cuts. More research is needed before the technology is ready for wide use, but with “sustained investments,” it could be available to patients within a decade, he said.

Stroke survivor speaks again with help of experimental brain-computer implant

Scientists have developed a device that can translate thoughts about speech into spoken words in real time.

torontosun.com

 

[spaminator]

‘Certified health nut’ boasts about benefits of drinking urine
Author of the articleenette Wilford
Published Apr 01, 2025 • Last updated 17 hours ago • 2 minute read

Troy Casey, a self-described "certified health nut," who drinks his own urine as part of his daily wellness regimen.
Troy Casey, a self-described "certified health nut," who drinks his own urine as part of his daily wellness regimen.
A man who describes himself as a “certified health nut” is promoting the power of urine and how he makes it part of his daily regimen.


Troy Casey, a former model who claims to be a leading longevity authority, has one tried and true item on his to-do list every day: Drinking his own pee.

“I think it teaches your insides a little bit more about yourself,” he told the New York Post.

“Urine has stem cells, amino acids and antibodies,” Casey explained. “It’s the hair of the dog, a direct biofeedback loop. You know what’s wrong with you as soon as you drink your morning pee.”

Several medical professionals warned against Casey’s urinary cures and treatments. One doctor cautioned that drinking urine can be hazardous because it is both dehydrating and contaminating, while a registered dietitian stressed that drinking urine is not a solution for stomach issues.


Casey said he believes that the pharmaceutical industry is purposely covering up natural healing methods to try to prevent people from healing themselves through themselves.

Casey said he was introduced to urine therapy when a friend claimed to have cured himself of testicular cancer through urine looping (drinking only your own urine and supplementing it with water for a designated period of time).

The experience of his friend, who was also helping Casey with his breathwork, convinced the former model to try it — and he continues to tout the benefits.



Casey uses a mason jar so it can be stored, and opts to drink what he calls the “middle pee,” which involves “emptying the first splash of his morning stream into the toilet,” then portioning some in the jar before finishing off in the bowl.

“The morning pee has the most stem cells, and if you ferment it for up to three weeks, it has hundreds of millions of stem cells,” he told the outlet.

Troy Casey CHN on Instagram: "If you’re looking to learn more about urine therapy comment the word URINE and I’ll send you my guide."

5,006 likes, 1,039 comments - certifiedhealthnut on February 27, 2025: "If you’re looking to learn more about urine therapy comment the word URINE and I’ll send you my guide.".

instagram.com

I drink my own pee for the health benefits — I also do urine enemas and splash it on my skin to sunbathe

Troy Casey doesn’t mind the taste, calling it “hair of the dog” — but several experts have shared warnings about his “direct biofeedback loop.”

nypost.com

‘Certified health nut’ boasts about benefits of drinking urine

A man who describes himself as a “certified health nut” reveals the power of urine and how he makes it part of his daily regimen.

torontosun.com

 

[spaminator]

Volcano erupts in southwestern Iceland after a nearby town and spa are evacuated
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Marco Di Marco
Published Apr 01, 2025 • Last updated 20 hours ago • 1 minute read

Iceland volcano
A volcanic eruption that started on the Reykjanes Peninsula in Iceland, Wednesday, Nov.20, 2024. Photo by Marco di Marco /AP Photo
GRINDAVIK, Iceland — A volcano in southwestern Iceland that has erupted repeatedly for more than a year again belched lava and smoke into the air on Tuesday, just hours after authorities evacuated the few remaining residents of a nearby fishing village.


The eruption began at 9:45 a.m. local time (0945 GMT), triggering warning sirens in the town of Grindavik where webcams showed molten rock spewing toward the community. It had subsided by late afternoon, though the volcano was still active, Iceland’s Met Office said.

Police and civil defence officials evacuated Grindavik and the Blue Lagoon geothermal spa, one of Iceland’s biggest tourist attractions, after an early morning earthquake swarm suggested an eruption was imminent.

The community, located on the Reykjanes Peninsula, was largely evacuated in November 2023 when the volcano came to life after lying dormant for some 800 years.

About 40 homes were evacuated on Tuesday, though police reported that some residents refused to leave their homes.

“Those individuals who choose to remain in the town don’t seem to consider that I have 50 people involved in this operation, some of whom are volunteers,” Úlfar Luðviksson, police commissioner in South Iceland, told local broadcaster RUV. “I would ask that more consideration be shown towards civil defence.”

Iceland sits above a volcanic hot spot in the North Atlantic. The most disruptive incident in recent times was the 2010 eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which spewed clouds of ash into the atmosphere and disrupted trans-Atlantic air travel for months.

Flights were not affected by Tuesday’s eruption.

Volcano erupts in southwestern Iceland after a nearby town and spa are evacuated

A volcano in southwestern Iceland that has erupted repeatedly for more than a year again belched lava and smoke into the air on Tuesday.

torontosun.com